The equation never changes, for quite some time it’s been all about recency, frequency and monetary value. Depending on a customer’s buying history, you could influence their behavior by using these segments to market to them effectively.
Recency, Frequency and Monetary Value:
- Recent customers are more apt to making additional visits or purchases – so they are great prospects. You may notice this as a consumer, you get a ton of marketing communications and catalogs after making a purchase from a company – and then they drop off. Sometimes they even throw in a coupon or discount. It’s all to maximize the revenue from the initial conversion.
- Frequent customers are the cream of the crop, and your perfect target for upsell opportunities. The goal with frequent customers is usually to grow the value of each sale. This can significantly grow your bottom line.
- Valuable customers is based on the amount of money your customers spend with you on a periodic basis (period depends on your business and industry). Value provides you with an understanding of who the ‘average’ customer is, who can be marketed to to push their average up… and who can be rewarded for being an above average customer.
If you’re not using this approach to segment your customers, you need to be!
Search engines are very similar in how they segment… er… rank your website or blog. Recency of your content, frequency of your content and the value of your content are what are key to a search engine.
- Recent content – Google loves recent content. I don’t know the secrets of the Google algorithm but it’s no surprise that my old blog posts seem to fade into obsolescence and new posts rise in the ranking – even when the content is incredibly similar.
- Frequent content – Google indexes and analyzes your site when you post. The Google bots check your site often, and even increase how often your site is indexed depending on the frequency of changes to your site. Writing frequently helps educate the bots as to how often to return (active sites with a ton of user-generated content get indexed more often and, ironically, rank well).
Frequent content also formulates a pile of content for Google to begin understanding what your site is about. If I write a great post today about the recession, an economic site with the same ranking and relevance will show up far higher than I will in the rankings. That’s no surprise, is it?
- Content Value – Google measures the relevance of your content on the page with what keywords you mention and then validates it off-page by the keywords used when referencing your site or blog. Writing more content naturally provides a nice well to backlink to, so sites with a lot of great content tend to have a lot of great backlinks and; as a result, rank well.
As you are tending to your site or blog this week, wondering how you can impact your search traffic… think of yourself as a customer of Google. Improve your site or blogs value to Google by concentrating on your RFM. Write now, write frequently and write great content.
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